Clara’s Verdict
Sloane is supposed to be getting married. Instead the day collapses, and the man who spirits her away is Jasper Gervais: professional hockey player, her childhood best friend, and the person she has loved in silence for years. Elsie Silver opens the third Chestnut Springs book with a runaway bride and a getaway driver who is anything but neutral, and I admired the economy of it: one scene, and every stake is already on the table.
What follows is friends-to-lovers played as mutual rescue. When Jasper’s own world buckles, Sloane is the one who returns the favour, and the impromptu road trip that results is a pressure cooker disguised as an escape. My honest caution: this is a long simmer. Years of suppressed feeling do not resolve quickly, and listeners who need early payoff may fidget through the middle stretch. Those who savour yearning will consider that stretch the entire point.
What This Edition Is and Who It’s For
Powerless is the third instalment in the Chestnut Springs series, published in audio by Little, Brown Book Group on 6 April 2023 and running 10 hours and 25 minutes. The publisher bills Silver as a no.1 Sunday Times bestselling author and the Queen of Cowboy romance, which tells you the register precisely: small town, big feelings, no cynicism whatsoever.
Like most linked romance series, each book centres its own couple, and this one belongs entirely to Jasper and Sloane. The premise carries its history within it, a decade of secret love and a wedding that falls apart, so newcomers can begin here without feeling stranded, though the small-town fabric will feel richer to anyone who started at book one.
CJ Bloom Takes the Reins
CJ Bloom narrates, and the assignment is a delicate one. Jasper is the classic Silver hero, a heartthrob to the television cameras and a lost boy underneath, and the performance has to let both registers coexist without tipping into melodrama. Sloane’s long-guarded love asks for restraint rather than breathlessness.
Across more than ten hours of interiority, pacing decides everything: the glances, the almosts, the moment a friend stops touching you like a friend. A narrator who trusts the silence between the lines serves this material best, and that is precisely what the story’s slow turn requires.
What Readers Say
This listing carries no written listener reviews, so I shall not conjure any. What it does carry is a healthy sample: 4.3 stars from 107 ratings, which for a series romance suggests the faithful got exactly what they came for. The publisher’s copy adds press notices, with the Radio Times declaring that no one really does it better than Elsie Silver, and the Daily Mail confessing she is fast becoming one of its reviewers’ favourite romance authors. Ratings and critics pointing the same way is usually a reliable sign.
Who Should Listen?
This is one for devotees of friends-to-lovers, secret pining and heroes who turn up at the precise moment a wedding falls apart. If hockey and cowboy country sound like an odd pairing, trust that Chestnut Springs makes room for both. Skip it if long-delayed confessions make you impatient rather than giddy, or if you want your romance brisk and banter-led rather than ache-led. Everyone else should clear a quiet weekend: this is a story that rewards uninterrupted wallowing, and I mean that as high praise.
